Microlite Games
I've just started looking at the Microlite concept again.
There's some interesting ideas tied up in that school of thought, and it almost links in with the single page games that I've toyed with over the past couple of years.
The way I understand it, Greywulf (AKA Seth Drebitko) started the whole thing with Microlite d20, a rebellion against what was happening to D&D. Others have started to take their own favourite game systems and have stripped away the superfluous crap to give some really tight games.
Do the games benefit from this?
I'm not sure. They certainly give control back to the GM and player, rather than absorbing all the responsibility through copious pages of rulebooks. But they leave a lot of work for the participants. A minimum of fluff/colour/flavour-text means that players don't argue over what it says on a certain page, instead they have the chance to argue about different interpretations at a much wider and more fundamental level.
On the other hand, a good strong GM with a very specific game idea in mind could easily pick up one of the Microlite games most suited to the style of play she is going for, and could dominate the game to their will without having players fall back on rule books to defend themselves...so in this style of play the lack of pages is great.
I'll be making a few posts about some of the microlite games I've seen recently, notably Microlite d20 and Microlite WoD. Then looking at how some of my other ideas fit around them (eg. Vector Theory).
There's some interesting ideas tied up in that school of thought, and it almost links in with the single page games that I've toyed with over the past couple of years.
The way I understand it, Greywulf (AKA Seth Drebitko) started the whole thing with Microlite d20, a rebellion against what was happening to D&D. Others have started to take their own favourite game systems and have stripped away the superfluous crap to give some really tight games.
Do the games benefit from this?
I'm not sure. They certainly give control back to the GM and player, rather than absorbing all the responsibility through copious pages of rulebooks. But they leave a lot of work for the participants. A minimum of fluff/colour/flavour-text means that players don't argue over what it says on a certain page, instead they have the chance to argue about different interpretations at a much wider and more fundamental level.
On the other hand, a good strong GM with a very specific game idea in mind could easily pick up one of the Microlite games most suited to the style of play she is going for, and could dominate the game to their will without having players fall back on rule books to defend themselves...so in this style of play the lack of pages is great.
I'll be making a few posts about some of the microlite games I've seen recently, notably Microlite d20 and Microlite WoD. Then looking at how some of my other ideas fit around them (eg. Vector Theory).
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Comments
I have a love/hate relationship with GURPS. It looks great when I read the manuals and source books, but character creation and actual execution leave me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Lately I've been toyingnwith HeroQuest, Wordplay and Mythic Russia... Kind of leaving my comfort zone, but all three of these have some really interesting perspectives that I've not really thought of before.
I'll make sure I get my research done right before I make my first post about the system, and I'll make the appropriate apologies if necessary.
One minor clarification: Microlite20 wasn't a rebellion against anything. It was an experiment to see just how minimal you could make a d20/SRD based game and still be playable. From there, it's spawned a whole plethora of games and variants which all use, expand and/or modify the core in some way.
I'm proud to have been around to help kick the whole thing off at the start.